Hope for the Afflicted

"...the hope of the afflicted will never perish."
-Psalm 9:18

When I read this I think of my mom. The cruelty of Alzeheimer's has afflicted her. She cannot see, cannot feed herself, sometimes cannot speak, cannot remember so much. Yet she never responds like Job, with a "woe is me." Her prayer is the prayer of the hopeful, filled with thankfulness for a God who is her best friend and constant companion. She always prays for help to "do what she should do" and thanks for "God's presence."

I need to learn to live more like her, less concentration on what is "going wrong" and more on what God is doing. I have been promised a "hope and a future." The hardships of this life are temporary, while the rewards are eternal.

2014 Off My Bookshelf #5

The Goldfinch

By DonnaTart

"There was motion and stillness, stillness and modulation, and all the charge and magic of a great painting."

-page 721

"And isn't the whole point of things - beautiful things - that they connect you to some larger beauty? Those first images that crack your heart wide open and you spend the rest of your life chasing, or trying to recapture, in one way or another? Because I mean - mending old things, preserving them, looking after them - on some level there's no rational ground for it -"

-page 757

"Can't good come around sometimes through some strange back doors?"

-page 758

"And I think of what Hobie said: beauty alters the grain of reality."

-page 760

"And just as music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space between them, just as the sun strikes raindrops at a certain angle and throws a prism of color across the sky - so the space where I exist, and to be quite frank I hope to die in, is exactly this middle ground: where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime."

- page 770-771

"That maybe even if we're not always glad to be here, it's our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open."

-page 771

2014 Off My Bookshelf #4

Divergent

By Veronica Roth

"Human beings as a whole cannot be good for long before the bad creeps back in and poisons us." -page 440

(and thus the need to turn to God over and over and over again.)

2014 Off My Bookshelf #3

Age of Innocence

By Edith Warton

Rereading a beloved book is like snuggling down under a favorite blanket.

Ah, Countess Olenska...
"The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!"

Oh, Archer...
"The taste of the usual was like cinders in his mouth, and there were moments when he felt as if he were being buried alive under his future."

Poor May...
"Once more it was borne in on him that marriage was not the safe anchorage he had been taught to think, but a voyage on uncharted seas."

"We can't behave like people in novels, though, can we?"